He was again in the North-West Provinces, responsible for a great district, and well worthy of responsibility, though but thirty-seven years of age. He was self-reliant, able, and energetic, and if reserved and given to sarcasm, Gascoigne was popular, being generous and hospitable to a fault. His bungalow was well appointed; all that it wanted was a mistress (so said the ladies of the station). But Philip Gascoigne's thoughts did not lean towards matrimony; his tastes were solitary and simple; when away on duty or on the frontier, no one lived a harder or more frugal life. He was well inured to the Indian climate, master of several tongues; he had a capital head for ideas, a mathematical mind; his heart was in his work, his profession was his idol. Work with him amounted to a passion, and had effectually chased love from his thoughts. He was one of the men whom luxury and decadence had left untouched, and upon whom the executive business of the Empire, in its remoter parts, could depend. Gascoigne was so good-looking, cheery, popular, and eligible that many women spread their nets in the sight of that _rara avis_, an agreeable, invulnerable bachelor. Over a series of years he had successfully eluded every effort to "catch him," and kept all would-be mothers-in-law politely at a distance. By this time he was given up as a hopeless case, and one indignant matron had said in her wrath: "Major Gascoigne will let every chance of a suitable wife go by, and when he is in his dotage will make a fool of himself by marrying a girl in her teens." But so far Major Gascoigne was a long way from dotage, or the fulfilment of this disastrous prediction. CHAPTER XVII THE UNEXPECTED IT was the month of September in the Himalayas, when the rains are heaviest, landslips frequent, and whole hillsides crumble and slide into the valley with a sound of thunder, that Major Gascoigne was summoned up to Kumaon in order to cope with a series of disasters. Bridges had been destroyed by racing torrents, roads were washed away; such floods had not visited these regions for twenty years, so said the hill folk, and traffic between the stations of Shirani and Chotah-Bilat was practically at an end. It was not that the roads were impassable, but that there were no roads whatever. The common route by the river (to reach the so-called staircase) was now a boiling torrent, which had risen in its fury and torn away pieces of the great cart road, and dragged down and swallowed walls, buttress, bridges. Under these circumstances, when troops were waiting to march, and most people were moving towards the plains, transport and traffic were paralysed, and loud was the outcry.